Art This article is more than 7 months oldObituaryJohn Dugger obituary
This article is more than 7 months oldArtist who founded radical creative collectives and pioneered political banners as a form of ‘social media’
The American artist John Dugger, who has died aged 74, engaged with the avant garde soon after arriving in London in 1967. A co-founder of the radical Artists Liberation Front and Artists for Democracy, he was an early exponent of participatory art – with his People’s Participation Pavilion being constructed for Documenta 5, in Kassel in 1972 – and a pioneer of political banners, which he later said were a form of “social media before social media”.
Dugger produced the banner Chile Vencerá ( “Chile will win”) displayed on Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square, in September 1974, for a rally organised by British trade unions and the Chilean Solidarity Campaign to protest against the military coup in Chile the previous year. In 1976, his banner A Vitória É Certa (“Victory is certain”), celebrating the founding of the People’s Republic of Angola, was shown in California, and members of the Black Panthers were photographed seated in front of it.
Born in Los Angeles, to James Dugger, a doctor in the US navy, and Julian (nee Riddle), John had three siblings, James, Robert and Elaine. His father’s career led to the family moving around, and John attended South junior high school in Kalamazoo, Michigan. After leaving Gilmore Art Institute (1963-66), also in Kalamazoo, Dugger spent a year at the Art Institute of Chicago before dropping out and moving to New York and then London.
He joined the Exploding Galaxy collective in their communal house on Balls Pond Road in Islington, north London, where he and the Filipino artist David Medalla collaborated on creating anti-Vietnam war performances and audience-participation events over the summer of 1968. The following year the pair visited Africa, India and south-east Asia to research popular art forms before returning to Europe to live on a houseboat in Paris.
There, in 1970, Dugger met and became close to the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark, and refined his ideas on participatory art to include sculptural objects with which the spectator could interact. His manifesto of that year, The Ergonic Messenger, was expressed in Perennials, multiple sculptures designed to be coiled up, folded back and then set down to unwind like a flower in its cycle of growth. Writing about these works, the art critic Guy Brett felt that Dugger had “joined that group of modern artists whose work has managed to combine a cosmic and a social consciousness”.
The following year, Dugger was included in Pioneers of Part-Art at the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford. His Biomass Installation was an environment for visitors to use his Body Conductors and Curved Space Tubes sculptures – clear plastic tubes used to provide sensory and aural exchanges. At the private view, some of the visitors, in Dugger’s words, “over-participated” by treating artworks too enthusiastically and roughly, and so the artists decided to withdraw their works.
Later in 1971 came his first solo exhibition, Microscosm: Exhibition of Environmental Art at the Sigi Krauss Gallery – the curator Harald Szeemann visited and invited Dugger to take part in Documenta 5.
For that, Dugger designed a red-painted structure based on an open-sided, south-east Asian long house. He named it the People’s Participation Pavilion and invited Medalla and others to exhibit inside. As a first public action of the Artists Liberation Front, founded by the pair in 1971, Dugger and Medalla climbed on to the roof and unfurled a banner stating Socialist Art Through Socialist Revolution.
In 1972, Dugger joined a youth delegation to visit China during the last phase of the Cultural Revolution. The visit led him to rethink his practice as being “an art of social participation that learned from and served the masses”.
He took to wearing a Chinese worker’s cap and jacket and, later that year, invited visitors to his show People Weave a House! at the ICA, central London, to build structures based on Vietnamese village buildings, using more than five miles of transparent plastic tubing.
In spring 1974, Dugger, Medalla and Brett attended a talk at the ICA by the Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña, a leading figure in the Chile Solidarity Campaign. A friendship developed, and together they formed Artists for Democracy (AFD), for “artists, art historians, art critics, art teachers, art students and other cultural workers” to support “anti-imperialist” struggles, with Chile as their first project.
That October, at the Royal College of Art in London, AFD organised the Arts Festival for Democracy in Chile. Artists all over the world were asked to donate works for an exhibition and auction. Dugger made his Chile Vencerá banner, a secular altarpiece with a palette and visual language derived from French modernism, in particular Matisse’s late collages, and schematic figures illustrating the labour and sacrifice of Chilean workers. His new “strip banner” process made this vast work portable, as the individual fabric appliqué strips could be rolled up and fitted into a suitcase.
As the festival ended, political and personal differences at AFD led Dugger and Vicuña to leave the group. In late 1976, Dugger founded Banner Arts Studio, which, as well as making art pieces, accepted many professional commissions over the years, including from the House of Commons, the Greater London council, the Royal Festival Hall, Buckingham Palace, Microsoft and the Unilever Corporation.
From 1988 he was based in the US, having moved Banner Arts Studio to San Francisco. However, he maintained his links with London, doing a master’s in enterprise and management in the creative arts at the University of the Arts London (2006), and exhibiting with my gallery, England & Co.
His banners are in public collections including Tate, the Government Art Collection and Arts Council England.
He is survived by his wife, Tsering Lhakey, a nurse, whom he married in 1999, and stepdaughter, Tsering Dolker, and his brother Robert.
John Scott Dugger, artist, born 18 July 1948; died 31 May 2023
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